Phase 1b

Now we're finally starting 1b, which is all about characters. Top of the list is Clothing. You might think clothing is just a case of knocking together some clothes in Blender then slapping them on the models and done, and you'd be wrong.

The first job is to break the characters down into segments.

All the segments are weighted to the skeleton, so even when split apart, if they are added to the game correctly, they should move in unison. This also inadvertently solves another issue: more characters. But more on that in a minute.

The segments in theory are used as sections for clothing. So as standard you'd have the torso and legs as sections you swap in and out with the same section but with the clothing on. So for example, you have her topless. You select a t-shirt. The game removes the naked torso and replaces it with the t-shirt which also has the body sections not covered by clothing. After that, you have the feet, hands, tail and head on their own. Still swappable but not needed to be swapped, right?

Right?

Wrong. This is actually ideal for species changing. In general, the only things changing by species would be head shape, ears, paws/hands and tail. Why mess around having to make a fresh complete model for every species added when you can literally just swap the species specific parts? Even better, the head can have an attachment point to allow a range of hairs to be switched. After that, the only issue is fur patterning. Even that shouldn't be a massive problem.

If the player characters start with a species specific skin, you can have  a base colour and several other colours, chosen by colourpicker to customise the character. Add in hair selection, gender and skin colours, you have the basis of a pretty ok character creator.

But back to the clothes

See that explanation above? The stuff about swapping body parts for clothing is rubbish and fell apart almost instantly. The next hurdle is clothes layering. This is a sex game. The clothes have to come off. Which is where a damage system comes in. Clothes get a damage value. When the wolves attack or capture you, the clothes lose their damage. They go from pristine to worn to wrecked then disintegrate. The purpose of the clothes is to protect you a little while so you can struggle away or fight back. But this means holes appear in the clothes. What's underneath them?

To begin with I just modelled the players body only through the holes, but that got stopped quickly. It'll cause problems syncing it with custom skins. Plus it would be nice to have an underwear option beneath the clothes too, which would show through the holes. So, I took a step back and redid the system again.

The squirrel is already split, so we keep that layout. Bodyparts can still be switched, but the base will always be nude for torso and legs. Then we add 2 slots to both legs and torso: Underwear and Upperwear. The clothes then get modelled from duplicates of the body part to get scaling, shape and clearances right. You start with the underwear, then build the outerwear above it to make sure everything stays under the clothes above.

Once that's one, the outerwear go through a duplication and damage/holes are added for L2 damage. Then the L2 version is duplicated and fucked up even more for L3.

Then each item gets added to a datatable that has links to the stats for the item of clothing plus all the damage levels. I added panties, bra, 3 trousers/shorts and 4 tops, which gives us this:

The next stage is letting the player swap clothes themselves. At the moment it's all in blueprints and code. But this demonstrates how you can layer clothes. Eventually, I'd like to add in jackets as well for an additional layer, but the beauty of this system is as long as the component attachment points are the same shape, these clothes should work for any female character!